Last week, dozens of Hong Kong activists were arrested and had their homes raided for violating the Beijing-imposed National Security Act.
Other images of Beijing’s draconian influence in Hong Kong have emerged since. Joshua Wong, one of the leaders of the pro-democracy movement, has been seen in chains being moved from prison to prison while denied access to a lawyer. Convicted of violating the security act, Wong could face life in prisons.
Before he went to jail, I had a chance to talk to Wong and asked if there was anything that I could do to help. Wong said he had a 50-50 chance of spending time behind bars but that he was unafraid of any outcome because he believed in the correctness of his actions.
Wong first caught the public eye as a high school student who stood up to Beijing’s brainwashing in Hong Kong, he stayed in the public eye as a community organizer and coordinator, mentioned in magazine pages alongside activist leaders like Greta Thunberg, the BLM movement, and the student-protesters in Thailand.
What Wong faces in Hong Kong is something young people around the world also face. Around the world, we are growing up in a society marked by mass surveillance, sweeping security laws, economic dissatisfaction, and the decay of liberty. Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.
The people arrested last week share one thing in common and it is one thing that we must recognize. They are the vanguards in the fight for liberty and against the total control of the state and their fall should be a signal to the rest of us that we are not far behind unless we join and enhance the conflict.
Even in supposed stable democracies, we have seen the corrupting influence of nationalism, conspiracy, and the encroachment on civil liberties by corrupt governments and corporations willing to turn a blind eye to enhance the bottom line. We have seen regular people driven to burn down their own institutions at the behest of despots.
We are not far behind Hong Kong and we must not let Wong and his friends’ struggle be in vain.
Too many people are willing to turn a blind eye to the death of liberty in the pursuit of a bottom line or to preserve good relations with a belligerent superpower. The world has seen and judged these cowards before. We have attributed damaging adjectives like apologists or appeasers or enablers to these failures of history but fail to realize the same attributes among our contemporaries.
With the world now transitioning to new leadership both in the United States and elsewhere, the opportunity is there to confront totalitarianism and nationalism in the name of liberty.